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I turned to Tris, whose eyes were wide with surprise. We’d reconnected, fallen in love properly this time, but I’d never told her exactly why I’d disappeared from their lives.
“See?” Peter interjected, turning back to Tris. “He left you once. He’ll do it again.”
Fear froze me in its icy grip. The same fear that had prompted me to leave them. What if he was right? What if, when it came down to it, she would always choose Peter in the end?
“That’s not fair,” Tris said, but I could see the doubt flicker across her face.
“Isn’t it?” Peter pushed. “He walked away when things got hard. What happens next time? When the next contract comes through—or it doesn’t—or when you need someone to be there for you?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, but the words felt hollow even to me. Because he was voicing my deepest fear—that I wasn’t enough, that I’d never be enough against the golden boy who’d always had everything I wanted.
Tris looked between us, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t do this. I can’t let your feud tear me apart.”
“Tris—” We both said simultaneously.
The tears filling her eyes stabbed at my gut, forcing me to think about all the years wasted. “Tink, don’t listen to him. He has nothing to do with what we have.”
She bit her lip, indecision warring within her eyes. “It’s not that simple, Killian.”
Frustration and fury ate at me while bitterness lodged itself in my throat and made it hard to swallow. Old feelings of being discarded and not regarded as important enough to be chosen raced through me, making me want to walk away again. “It shouldn’t be that hard either,” I ground out, realizing how unfair that statement was even as the words passed my lips.
“You want me to choose,” she said. “You’vebothalways wanted me to choose, haven’t you? I’m finally seeing that now. But did either of you ever think about whatIwanted? WhatIneeded?”
The question hung in the air.
“Don’t you get it, Tris?” Peter threw his arm out in my direction. Hostility burned in his gaze. “He only wants to get back at me. He’ll fuck you and then walk away. You don’t mean anything to him.”
Red sheeted my vision as Peter turned what we had into something disgusting and crass.
She grabbed her things. “I need some air.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said, reaching for her hand, trying to clear the rage that burned inside me.
“No.” The finality in her voice stopped me cold. “I need to be alone. Both of you … Just stay away from each other. Please.”
Tris pushed the door open, not noticing when it caught on a nearby chair and didn’t close. She walked out, leaving Peter and me in a silence filled with almost two decades of rivalry, jealousy, and misunderstanding.
The tension in the room thickened.
Peter’s eyes never left mine. “If you fucking hurt her … ”
“I could say the same thing to you,” I cut him off. “You’ve been hurting her for years without even noticing—and if you have, you’re crueler than I thought.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“I know she deserves better than being caught between us like this.” I picked up my guitar, needing something to hold onto. “She deserves better than both of us.”
“On that,” Peter said, his voice bitter, “we might finally agree.”
We stood there, two men who’d known each other since childhood, who’d once been best friends before ambition and love turned us into strangers.
Both terrified of losing the one person who had always believed in us.
“You never deserved her,” Peter said, breaking the silence. “You walked out on her, just like you walked out on your career. Just like you walk out on everything when it gets too hard.”
I set my guitar down carefully, my hands shaking with rage. “At least I fuckingsawher. You had her love foryearsand you never once acknowledged it.”
“What would you know about it?” Peter took a step closer. “You weren’t there. You ran away like a coward.”